Most Shared

Jon Rafman Sees the Internet, Unleashed

Last year at Frieze New York, one booth was converted into a squalid little theater that ran hour-long, slightly sinister videos on loop depicting 3-D animated, humanoid characters. These avatars played with technology; they entered alternate realms, in which they wandered about alongside creatures seemingly born from video games; they found stars in night skies comprised of twinkling pixels; they engaged in peculiar, Internet-sourced specific sex acts. The experience was both akin to stepping into a cartoon version of Black Mirror and one of the art fair’s more popular exhibitions, which is saying something. Jon Rafman, the Montreal-based video artist behind the piece—and an influential on-the-rise animator—thinks he knows what that “something” is.

Both inspired and disturbed by our increasingly obsessive predilection for technology use, Rafman has spent substantial time thinking about not only what Internet subcultures and their darkest corners are doing to our psyches, but also how those effects will play out in the years to come. Will there ever be a day in which we accept virtual reality as on par with our real-life one? Will we even be able to tell the difference? “I want to understand how my mind has been corrupted by my constant consumption of the Internet,” he says. "To what extent are we structuring the world and to what extent is the world structuring us?”

Dark as these themes may be, Rafman—whose initial impetus to become an artist was one day stumbling upon a dead body near Montreal ("No joke") —searches on, citing the Bruce Nauman image that leads his charge: “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.”